Imagine if, over the course of a summer, a few young guys out of their minds on crack had run down and killed some completely innocent civilians in the city. Imagine the community reaction. Imagine the calls for a crackdown on drugs, for new levels of community intervention, for intensified and spirited enforcement.

Now take a look at our paper over the past couple of months.

A young guy, who investigators believe spent a long day pounding back cold ones, plows his boat into the boat of a young couple on Skaneateles Lake, killing them both. Not long after that, another young guy who'd been drinking plows into the boat of an elderly fisherman on Oneida Lake. Witnesses say the fisherman was standing there, waving his arms, before the collision. The man was killed.

In the same morning's paper, we read of how a few young women - after drinking long and hard - inexplicably went out and vandalized a brand-new sports complex at Nottingham High School. And you can go back over the summer, day by day and week by week, and read similar accounts of otherwise rational and well-meaning young people who go out and get wrecked and then commit illogical, it not downright deadly, acts.

If it had been crack, we would be talking about the scourge of drugs. But we don't, not in these cases, because this truth is scratchy, and more uncomfortable: The most dangerous drug in the United States is alcohol. It wrecks homes without discrimination, from Harlem to the Hamptons. It leads to far more violent deaths, intentionally or accidentally, than reefer or any of the drugs we love to demonize.

Yet the alcohol industry is so deeply intertwined with every level of American life - from professional sports to any vision in most cities for downtown renaissance - that we have become, culturally, a society of enablers. (Remember the howls of protest any time the police put up DWI roadblocks near any thriving tavern district?) The level of abuse is so commonplace, and so profound, that we are incapable as a society of properly educating our own children, whose usual education comes from watching their role models getting ...